


Make a Fool of Death

by gleamingandwholeanddeadly (something_safe)



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types, Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris
Genre: Hannibal Season 4, Hannibal and Will on the run, Hannibal takes Will to meet his Aunt Murasaki, If You Squint - Freeform, M/M, Murder Husbands, Post Fall, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, brief description of childhood trauma (violent), mentions of eating disorders, tw: PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-12
Updated: 2018-06-12
Packaged: 2019-05-21 05:09:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14908950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/something_safe/pseuds/gleamingandwholeanddeadly
Summary: Hannibal takes Will to meet his Aunt Murasaki in Japan some time after the Fall.





	Make a Fool of Death

**Author's Note:**

> This was very much inspired by the song the title comes from- Hunger by FATM. Predictable, I know.
> 
> I'm actually working on a bigger piece for this idea but I received the following prompt and wanted to have fun and do something a bit lighter and see what other ways this could go. Hope you like it.
> 
> Prompt:   
> _Hannibal's aunt (or uncle, or both) is alive, and she learns about Will. any season or post-S3 x_

One of the last places Will expects to end up is Japan. For some reason it just never seems quite right for Hannibal, despite its culture’s unquestionable influence on his personal style. After several long, agonising months of convalescing on the lam, they make the flight out to Sado Island, where Hannibal’s aunt’s ancestors lived for many generations before migrating to Europe. At the tiny airport, Hannibal rents them a bike and Will spends the journey behind him staring around at the endless fields and squat, white houses and wonders exactly when his life became a fucking action movie. The flat roads glide below, endless and straight, giving way to neat slatted fences and yawning fields of gold and green flanked by trees. The sun blazes overhead, and in the distance, Will sees mountains.  

 

Hannibal’s aunt is still beautiful, in a stately, serene way, with silver streaking her dark hair and cool, knowing eyes that make Will feel inherently guilty for turning up at her sweet little home with her monstrous nephew in tow. She’s clearly worked hard to get away from him. Her surprise is a painful thing when she opens the door and takes in the sight of them- the realisation that Hannibal has known this whole time that she was alive, here, hidden. She doesn’t show that she’s afraid, but Will has been around fear enough to know the glassiness in her eyes isn’t just tears at their reunion. 

She talks to Hannibal in hushed, urgent Japanese, and he smiles at her and pats her shoulder before he holds a hand out for Will and says something Will doesn’t understand- with an expression on his face that Will knows all too well. That’s awkward, too. Very awkward.

“Will. This is my Aunt Murasaki. She says we can stay here for a few days until we find alternative accommodation.”

“How do you do,” Will says, offering a hand. He wonders if Chiyoh came here after they parted ways. Perhaps she knew where Murasaki was all along. Would Hannibal kill her for withholding that information? Maybe.

Murasaki considers him plainly, probably trying to decide which of them is the first one she ought to kill should things go south. She must decide Hannibal, because she gives Will a little bow and says, “Welcome, Will. Hannibal. Can I offer you a drink?”

The inside of the house is clean and bright and, despite the humble setting, seems to have a more delicate note of the same effortless elegance and richness that Hannibal uses so excessively in his own homes.  There are paintings on the walls that Will knows at once to be both Hannibal’s and his uncle’s, and he studies them while Murasaki makes tea. The styles are strikingly similar, the subject wildly different. It’s more touching than he ever realised it would be, seeing hints of Hannibal’s boyhood. His fingers graze the edge of a canvas, stiff with paint. Pomegranates and bones.

“I was somewhat more whimsical as a young man,” Hannibal explains, making Will jump.

“More dramatic, you mean?” Hannibal flashes him the points of his little crooked teeth in a smile. “God, you’re good. I thought you only used pencil.”

“Easier to travel with. Less clean up.”

“Easier to control.”

Hannibal patiently ignores his reductions.

“Art became a way of testing my memory; strengthening the muscle.”

“Did you ever draw your sister?” Will asks, without much thought for danger now: they’ve had much sharper talks; he’s not afraid of stretching Hannibal’s good will anymore.

“Once or twice. I always burned them right away.”

“I’d like to see her one day.”

Hannibal is suddenly very close. Will feels his exhaled breath against his shoulder. When he looks, Hannibal’s neck bares the stiffness of the disarmed; wobbling for purchase.

“Yes, you’d like to see everything I hold dear, wouldn’t you?”

“Isn’t that why you brought me here?” Will says. He looks at him out of his periphery, and their eyes snag. Hannibal’s fingers brush his waist.

They have dinner that first night, and it turns out that Murasaki is a better cook than even Hannibal. Will eats more than is probably polite, but his spoons are low after months of food on the go and the journey here has left him hollow with hunger. Hannibal watches him with a smile touching the corners of his eyes. Neither of them acknowledges that Murasaki is watching them both with bare hostility. 

After dinner, she shows them to a guest room- just one, with two futon mattresses. Will is entirely beyond caring about her deductions about him and Hannibal. They pull the mattresses together and shake out the quilts and then strip down. Their positioning is automatic by now: Will curled on his side, Hannibal a furnace against his back, connected chin to shoulder and hip to spine. In the dark with the strange new sounds around them, Will feels suspended in a dream, overwhelmed with tiredness and jetlag. Hannibal’s hand strokes his stomach, fingers skimming the lip of the scar there.

“What did you tell her when we got here? That I was your ‘Nakama’?”

“I said husband,” Hannibal mutters. Will bites his lip and covers his hand with his own.

“Figures.” With a kiss hidden in the curls at the nape of his neck, his eyes flicker shut. After that, sleep comes to him in minutes.

 

He wakes to thin dawn light reaching through the edges of the shutters with spindly fingers. His dreams prodded him out of sleep, but he’s not quite as frantic as he has been in recent weeks. Beside him, Hannibal still sleeps soundly: prison has honed his ability to sleep through almost anything, including deafeningly loud gospel. Will leaves him and ventures barefoot back through the house to the living room. He’d like to look at more of the paintings; to understand why Murasaki has so many if she fears Hannibal so greatly.

He’s studying a drawing of a flayed corpse when he becomes aware of her watching him from the living room doorway.

“He was always a keen student of the arts,” she says, her voice crisp and soft in all the right places- an accent like a bubbling brook. “I taught him to play the piano. Has he kept it up?”

“He had a harpsichord back in Baltimore. He likes to showcase his talents. Looks like you like to showcase them too.”

“Robertas saw his brother in Hannibal. He said he had his patience, and his curiosity. Of course, Robertas didn’t see him when he became a man.”

Will doesn’t need to ask what she saw. He can guess.

“What was he like, when he came to live with you?”

“He was mute, and damaged,” Murasaki says, folding her thin arms. When Will finally looks at her, she’s draped in a silk robe, taller than she’d seemed last night as she compacted herself around Hannibal. She’s not afraid of Will, he realises, without knowing why.

“Was it Mischa that took his words away?”

“I think he was afraid that all he had left were screams. Hannibal was never a normal boy. Robertas said even as a child- before I knew him- he was serious and solitary.”

It’s easy to imagine him. Thin and severe but unassuming, with the disarming brittleness he maintained as an adult, veiling him with demure eccentricity: strange but safe. Will has the fleeting thought that maybe Hannibal wore glasses as a young man, too, despite having perfect vision. He wears them now sometimes, but it’s age.

“’Normal’ is perishable.”

“Disposable,” Murasaki agrees, “things must hold Hannibal’s interest for him to leave them intact.”

“They must feed his hunger,” Will says, wondering on the suppleness of the muscle on the page before him: the way it looks ready to give under the right teeth.

“We all have our hungers. What are yours, Will Graham?”

“That’s the question I’ve been asking myself since I met Hannibal.”

Murasaki comes to stand beside him. They gaze at the paintings together in silence for a stretch.

“When Hannibal came to live with us, he didn’t eat well at first. He had stages- he would eat in the kitchen where no one could see him, or he wouldn’t eat at all. It was if he was afraid to grow accustomed to eating again.”

“He spent a while in the orphanage before you found him. I’m guessing the food there wasn’t up to much. No way of knowing what was in it, either.”

“He knows what starvation feels like,” Murasaki says solemnly, “and he knows how it feels to be blinded by hunger.”

“When he was starving, he ate what he loved the most.”

“He’s the same now.”

“His hunger is a beast that rails against his mortal flesh.”

Murasaki’s voice goes soft with sombreness. “He feeds it daily to keep it in check.”

“It’s not just a physical pathology,” Will murmurs, “it’s emotional, too.”

“Which is the worst way to starve, do you think?”

Francis Dolarhyde briefly flashes through his mind. Schizophrenia isn’t Hannibal’s problem. It’s his true self that he hides, not a dangerous figment of his imagination.

“I’m sure he’s been trying to work that out for a long time.”

Murasaki bows her chin in a simple, pensive nod. Another reign of silence overpowers them for a while, and then she gives Will the cut of her cheekbone as she regards him: a gesture so familiar through Hannibal that it staggers him.

“You must feed him in some ways,” she observes, echoing the sentiment of Bedelia’s hateful condescension with a cleaner interest. “He would not have brought you here otherwise.”

“I have yet to fail to amuse him,” Will says, teeth cutting the words, “we complement one another in all sorts of unsavoury ways. For a while, I was hunting him, and he was hunting me.”

“You caught one another.”

“And now we keep one another. For better or for worse.”

“He was always fascinated by influence. You must influence one another.”

“We can’t seem to stop.”

“Then you’re already amusing him far more than I ever did. Hannibal’s desires outshone my influence quickly.”

“I would consider that a personal triumph, if I were you,” Will says, voice going weary for a stretch, “I’m not proud of the effect we have on one another for the most part.”

Murasaki measures him with her gaze at that, expression young with a flash of uncertainty, solidifying into reassurance.

“Let me make you some tea,” she says. Will bows his chin in thanks and goes back to gazing at the anatomical drawing on the wall. He’s suddenly hungry.

 

They walk uphill on paved paths through the forest, flanked by more hunkered down houses and the Jenga block neatness of temples and shrines. Murasaki had stayed at the house: she’s wisely reluctant to go into the woods with them – and so the walk is theirs, slow and sedate. Hannibal clutches his hip as they climb higher. Will’s ankle and ribs ache from injuries sustained in the fall, shoulder still stiff, so he gestures.

“Let’s sit down, I’m running on wheeze here.”

Visibly grateful, Hannibal lowers himself down on one of the great stone steps of the hillside path, angling his leg in a way to relieve the pressure on his hip.

“It never really occurred to me when I was a young man that one day my physical stamina would wane.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, you do all right.” Will can’t resist raising his eyebrows. Despite himself, Hannibal laughs.

“Your frustrations are showing, Will.”

“Well, you did fly us to your long-lost Aunt’s where we sleep on the floor on a napkin. Not exactly ideal conditions for ‘maintaining stamina’. Besides, we’re getting older, Hannibal. And we fell off a cliff last year.”

“We did not fall, you pushed us.”

“All right, no need to split hairs about it.”

“Splitting hairs is what I do.”

Will can’t deny the truth in that. He leans their shoulders together gently, startled when Hannibal’s hand creeps up to his jaw, fingers trailing the terrible scar down the side of his cheek. In the dappled light of the sun-shaded leaves, his eyes look black and bottomless, just the barest hint of maroon at the rim.

“Thank you for bringing me here to meet her,” Will manages when his breathing has recovered- from the touch as well as the climb.

“I had thought you would be jealous.”

“You hoped, more like.”

“Nothing wrong with that, in moderation. An evolved response, I think, to seeing what we need to survive threatened.” He strokes Will’s hair back with careful fingers. “I had already established I needed you in order to survive before it occurred to you about me.”

“That’s not quite true. I just thought I could starve myself of it.” Will takes his other hand, their fingers lacing gently. “Like withdrawal: you’re more like bad medicine than drugs, though.” Hannibal chuckles, and they stay like that for a moment, just watching one another in this new place, new feelings near.

“I always thought it strange how hunger was so similar to loneliness,” Hannibal muses eventually, “that same emptiness, deep in our core.”

“Sustenance is the same. Love is a feeding pattern. A commodity to be stored up for bare shelved winters.” He hums when Hannibal kisses his jaw. “You must have known how that felt, while you were away.”

“I’m more familiar with winters than I like to admit. Needless to say, I feel sufficiently replenished now.”

Their gazes linger again. Will leans in and Hannibal receives the press of his lips with a low, pleased rumble. It’s achingly familiar now, the particular rhythm of their kisses, starting slow and contained and growing in fervour. When they part to rest their foreheads together, Will thinks of standing on the bluff, overlooking the ocean. He’d do it again if it’d bring him back to this moment.

“Did we come here for you to forgive your aunt for leaving you, Hannibal?” He asks, his words buffeting Hannibal’s lips where they’re still pressed close.

“I came because I was curious what would happen.”

“And now that we’re here?”

“I feel strangely content to let the chips fall where they may.”

“She’s afraid.”

“I know. We won’t stay for long.”

He looks up at the sky that creeps in through the leaves overhead. Will looks too, breathing in the scent of dust and dew.

“You just wanted to come home?” He asks. Where their fingers are laced, Hannibal gently squeezes, expression serious when he looks at Will.

“I consider home to be a person more than a place. I was home the moment I laid eyes on you.”

Will cracks a smile, heart curiously full.

“I know the feeling.”

 

 


End file.
